1289

  • a person A subtle irony attends this instinctive assignment of humanity where the status of
    "personhood" is what is most at issue.

    • 1294

  • Portsmouth

    Portsmouth was at this time the principal commercial port of the south of England,
    maintaining a constant traffic between it and France. For a Londoner the normal crossing
    would have been via Kent, from Dover to Calais; but embarkation from Portsmouth would
    have been preferable for voyagers coming, like Alphonse and Victor, from the west
    of England.

    • 1295

  • to post To post means going overland in vehicles drawn by horses. Mary Shelley copies the
    experience recorded in her History of a Six Weeks' Tour, where the party left the
    Rhine after Cologne and proceeded on the final leg of their continental excursion
    by stagecoach.

    • 1296

  • my power is complete This curious phrase recalls us to the last colloquy between Victor and his Creature
    after the destruction of Victor's second being. There, asserting his mastery over
    Victor, the Creature claims that he will attain this "power" (III:3:11), which is
    that of reducing Victor to the state of utter wretchedness he has now reached.

    • 1301

  • I had had now neglected my promise for some time Since Victor and Clerval had not left London until the end of March, and as they
    had "passed a considerable period at Oxford" and "two months in Cumberland and Westmoreland,"
    not to mention the time spent in this lengthy journey northward, it should now be
    early in July, which is to say, almost a year after Victor's promise to his Creature.
    His pattern of attenuated delays throughout the novel is particularized in an earlier
    note.

    • 1300

  • the herd of common projectors "Projector" is a term commonly used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
    to refer to inventors, often in a pejorative sense. Its ambivalence of connotation
    is reflected in the double primary meaning assigned to it by the Oxford English Dictionary:
    a. One who forms a project, who plans or designs some enterprise or undertaking; a
    founder.

    b. In invidious use: A schemer; one who lives by his wits; a promoter of bubble companies;
    a speculator, a cheat.

    Samuel Johnson is, if anything, less evenhanded in the double definition of "projector"
    contained in his 1755 Dictionary: 1. One who forms schemes or designs.

    2. One who forms wild impracticable schemes.

    Perhaps the most famous literary account of projectors is that offered by Jonathan
    Swift in Gulliver's tour through the Grand Academy of Lagado (Gulliver's Travels,
    III.5), a think-tank populated by inventors of perfectly useless or insane conceptions
    and contraptions.

    Victor Frankenstein's desire to separate himself from madmen and hacks is thus easily
    justifiable, whether we construe it in accord with his ambition or his achievement.
    Yet, the tone of condescension in his phrasing is expressive of an arrogance and self-approbation
    that verges on universal contempt. Its natural complement in a social dimension would
    be a hierarchical rigidity denominated according to class, and in a psychological
    field the prejudice we customarily comprehend under the rubric of racism. In other
    words, there is an easy shift from this self-esteem to the denigration of the Other
    expressed by Victor's continual demonization of his Creature.

    • 1299

  • I will proceed with my tale With Victor's pause to utter his encomium upon Clerval and thus intrude a strong
    value judgment into his discourse, the question of narrative truth is once again brought
    to the fore. Once again, Victor intrudes the notion of a "tale," a word used by him
    (I:L4:28, I:3:13) and by the Creature (II:2:13, II:2:16, II:9:18) to describe their
    narratives, also (with a different construction of what might constitute the truth)
    in the last sentence of the novel's Preface.

    • 1298

  • in a prison As the initial consequence of Victor's abandoning his Creature led to his brother's
    death and Justine's being cast into the Swiss prison where he visited her, the second
    wave of dark events is starkly complementary. Now his best friend has been murdered
    and he has himself experienced the alienating effects of imprisonment.
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